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It began with an eclipse. In 1806, the Shawnee leader Tenskwatawa ("The Open Door") declared himself to be in direct contact with the Master of Life, and therefore, the supreme religious authority for all Native Americans. Those who disbelieved him, he warned, "would see darkness come over the sun." William Henry Harrison, governor of the Indiana Territory and future American president, scoffed at Tenskwatawa. If he was truly a prophet, Harrison taunted, let him perform a miracle. And Tenskwatawa did just that, making the sun go dark at midday.
In The Gods of Prophetstown, Adam Jortner provides a gripping account of the conflict between Tenskwatawa and Harrison, who finally collided in 1811 at a place called Tippecanoe. Though largely forgotten today, their rivalry determined the future of westward expansion and shaped the War of 1812. Jortner weaves together dual biographies of the opposing leaders. In the five years between the eclipse and the battle, Tenskwatawa used his spiritual leadership to forge a political pseudo-state with his brother Tecumseh. Harrison, meanwhile, built a power base in Indiana, rigging elections and maneuvering for higher position. Rejecting received wisdom, Jortner sees nothing as preordained-Native Americans were not inexorably falling toward dispossession and destruction. Deeply rooting his account in a generation of scholarship that has revolutionized Indian history, Jortner places the religious dimension of the struggle at the fore, recreating the spiritual landscapes trod by each side. The climactic battle, he writes, was as much a clash of gods as of men.
Written with profound insight and narrative verve, The Gods of Prophetstown recaptures a forgotten turning point in American history in time for the 200th anniversary of the Battle of Tippecanoe.
- Sales Rank: #610752 in Books
- Published on: 2011-12-12
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 6.50" h x 1.10" w x 9.20" l, 1.14 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 320 pages
Amazon.com Review
Amazon Exclusive: Author Q & A with Adam Jortner
Adam Jortner
Q: Did America really start a "holy war" in the early 19th century?
A: Just like today, a lot of Americans in the early 19th century thought God had a plan for the United States; they saw how the U.S. won the Revolution against all odds, and they understood it as the will of God--as providence. And at that time, there were a number of politicians who said we have a providential destiny to bring our citizens more liberty--to spread our civilization across the continent. That's what led to a war against Canada and the Native Americans, the War of 1812, which almost destroyed the country.
Q: This was a war against one religion in particular, wasn't it?
A: There was a holy man of the Shawnee nation who took the name Tenskwatawa, which roughly means "The Open Door." After 1804, he carries a message to the Native Americans across the frontier, but especially in the Ohio Valley. And his message is that the Master of Life, the great being who had created the world and made all the peoples of the Americas, had returned to guide his people on a new path towards independence and self-sufficiency. American officials worried about this religion because Tenskwatawa provided an alternative leadership for Native Americans; he refused to sell land and he refused to accept the perfidy of the Americans.
Q: Most of us only know William Henry Harrison as the guy who died after only being president for thirty days. Tell us more about him.
A: This all takes place thirty years before Harrison becomes President; in 1800, he was the governor of Indiana Territory, which he turned into his personal fiefdom. It's probably the least democratic place in the U.S. He appointed his own Senate, he exploited loopholes to make sure that his friends got elected, and he basically disenfranchised voters he thought were not going to vote for his handpicked candidates. And on top of that, he expands slavery in Indiana. And he's constantly reminding people that his way of doing things is the providential way; it's what freedom is and it's what God wants.
Q: What happened at the Battle of Tippecanoe?
A: A lot of pain for not much gain. Harrison's forces get trapped in an early morning skirmish outside the Prophet's city. There was a prolonged firefight, and Harrison's troops took the heavier losses, but eventually the Prophet's soldiers withdrew and abandoned their city. Harrison burns the city to the ground--but he immediately retreats, because he didn’t bring enough troops or materiel to secure the victory. And Tenskwatawa reoccupies the position and rebuilds the town.
Q: Did the Battle of Tippecanoe cause the War of 1812?
A: In part. Harrison was immediately censured by political enemies in Indiana and in Washington, D.C. for starting an unnecessary war. He's even investigated by Congress--but he saves himself by joining this push for a broader war against all the Northwest Indians and Canada.
Q: Most Americans know almost nothing about the War of 1812? Why is that? What should we remember about it?
A: I think we don't remember it because we lost. But in some ways, it's more important to remember because this was a war that politicians claimed was divine and would be easy to win. That's a cautionary tale. And I think it's important to remember as an example of the ways in which religious zealotry and political power can interact, on both sides of this conflict, and that's another cautionary tale.
Review
"[H]ighly recommended." --Library Journal
"Jortner's engaging style and exceptional prose make this provocative volume a pleasure to read." Journal of American History
About the Author
Adam Jortner teaches history at Auburn University. His essays have appeared in The Journal of the Early Republic and Early American Studies.
Most helpful customer reviews
32 of 36 people found the following review helpful.
An academically sound account of an epic war
By Alan F. Sewell
Students of American history tend to gloss over the amorphous period between the ratification of the Constitution in 1788 and the War of 1812. No single event of this era stands out as being truly decisive, and yet it was a time of relentless peril when the fledgling United States was brought to the very brink of destruction by threats of civil war between the political parties, by threats of secession of various combinations of states, and by the hostile alliance of the British in Canada and the Indian "nations" west of the Appalachians.
The most serious threat was posed by the alliance between the British and Indians. This alliance dovetails into one of the most fascinating periods of Native American history. The Indians had watched the land-hungry Americans drive their ancestors off the Eastern Seaboard. They had seen the Americans defeat the British in the War of Independence and then advance the frontier across the Appalachians and into Kentucky and Tennessee. They had seen the Americans start the drive north from the Ohio River into the last remaining Indian strongholds in Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio.
In the early 1800s the Indian confederations still inhabiting the wonderfully fertile lands between the Appalachian Mountains and the Mississippi River understood that they were on the cusp of annihilation. Their only hope of retaining their lands was to unite into a nation state that could field a disciplined army supplied with modern weapons by the British. Two Indian leaders, Tecumseh and his brother Tenskwatawa (aka The Prophet), attempted to rally the Indians into a war of annihilation to push the Whites back across the Appalachians and replace them with a great unified Indian Nation from British Canada to the Gulf of Mexico.
Tecumseh and The Prophet were opposed by the most intransigent of White leaders, William Henry Harrison, the military governor of the Indiana Territory who was relentless in evicting Indians from the Midwest. These Indian and White antagonists became locked in the death-struggle for control of what is today America's heartland.
This war was a very close-run struggle. The first ill-trained American armies venturing into the area were destroyed by Indians armed with British weapons. William Henry Harrison was one of the American generals who ultimately welded raw militias into a well-disciplined army capable of defeating the Indians on their own ground. One of the battles between Harrison's men and the Indians gave Harrison his epithet "Old Tippicannoe."
Harrison held the fate of Manifest Destiny in his hands. Had he not defeated Tecumseh and The Prophet, the British would have used the 1812 War to advance the frontier of Canada back down to the Ohio River where it had been before the Revolution. The territory between the Ohio River and the Great Lakes would now be a quasi-Indian nation under the flag of Canada. Thus, this is a story of the utmost importance to North American history.
Author Adam Jortner tells us this epic story in terms of personalities and history. He focuses the story on the personalities of The Prophet and William Harrison. He portrays the history objectively, as a struggle for empire between rival Indian confederations that paralleled the struggle for empire among the White "tribes" of British, French, American, and Spanish. He makes the point that the Indians ultimately lost control of the North American heartland because some of the tribes detested the other tribes more than they feared the Whites:
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It is important to underscore, however, that the story of dispossession in the eighteenth century was not simply a case of whites cheating Indians. Europeans are sometimes accused of fomenting conflict between Native American groups; there is truth to this claim. Nevertheless, it is also true that Native Americans harbored resentments, ambitions, and dreams of grandeur as surely as the Europeans did. The Iroquois used their alliances with European powers against their rivals.... The Iroquois willingness to dominate other tribes and benefit themselves assumed a new level of duplicity when they began to sell lands to which they had no claim.
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It takes courage on the part of an author to tell the story of the struggle between Whites and Indians from an even-handed viewpoint, acknowledging that neither side acted from pure motives.
The book also captures the essence of the main characters. William Henry Harrison personified the militant position of frontier Whites who saw America as a White Man's country that had no place for Indians. Tecumseh and the Prophet tried, and ultimately failed, to meld into a modern nation state the various factions of Indians, some of which were hostile to Whites, and some of whom were accommodating. The White and Indian cultures had already comingled so much on the frontier, including much intermarriage, that the old ways of the pure-blooded Indian were vanishing. The struggle was between Whites like Harrison who wanted to expel the Indians, and Tecumseh and the Prophet who wanted to preserve the traditional Indian ways by keeping Whites at a distance.
For these reasons I rate this book highly. I give kudos to Adam Jortner for tackling a period of American history that is very difficult to write about. It is difficult because the government of the United States did not exercise full control over the disputed territory beyond the Appalachians. Many subtle events at the federal, state, and individual levels converged to decide the ultimate fate of the American Midwest. Jortner's technique of illustrating the epic battle for the heart of North America by showing it as a microcosm between Tecumseh and The Prophet vs. William Harrison is a noble attempt to make a complex history understandable in terms of human interest. The book is also deeply researched and doesn't present any factual errors or biases toward any side of the conflict that I'm aware of.
However, there are some minor distractions in the story:
1. Despite its presumed focus on Tecumseh, The Prophet, and Harrison, it takes on many peripheral discussions about Indian culture, the politics of the fledgling USA, and the role of religion in early America. In the first chapters I found these "loose threads" distracting and tending to obscure an epic story by burying it in minutia. However, as I got further along I began to appreciate the author's technique of taking disparate threads and showing how they converged at the Battle of Tippecanoe.
2. The prologue is too long and may be incomprehensible to those who don't already know the story of how Tecumseh and The Prophet turned Harrison's words against him by pretending to prophesy a solar eclipse. I would suggest skipping the prologue and getting down to business in chapter 1.
3. The story is very well written for an academic style, but an academic style doesn't quite capture the full depth of human drama in the war beween Whites and Indians for the possession America's heartland. On the other hand, Jortner does an excellent job of sticking to the facts and not trying to embellish them with his own opinions or pandering to maudlin sentiments of modern-day political correctness. The story is told so even-handedly that it's hard to decide who to "cheer" for --- Harrison, the epitome of America's "Manifest Destiny" generation, or the Prophet and Tecumseh who knew that this would be their last chance to preserve their people's homeland.
4. The only criticism of substance is that the book may be climaxed on the wrong battle. The Battle of Tippecanoe in November 1811 was less decisive than the Battle of the Thames (in present-day Ontario) two years later in October 1813. In that battle Harrison crossed into Canada and defeated a combined army of British, Canadians, and Indians, killing Tecumseh and his dreams of a unified Indian nation. It was as decisive a battle as New Orleans or the Battle of Lake Erie, but it is rarely discussed. If Jortner writes another book, perhaps he can put more emphasis on this battle and its effect in ending the War of 1812.
This book is very well written and presents the little-known story of the war for the American Midwest comprehensively and factually. It is not as dramatic as some of the other works, like Dale Van Every's ARK OF EMPIRE or Allan Eckert's THAT DARK AND BLOODY RIVER, but it is absolutely factual and even-handed in telling the story of the war for America's heartland.
13 of 18 people found the following review helpful.
Understandably agenda driven
By B. McGregor
My mistake was reading into the title that "The gods of Prophetstown" referred to those two powerful men, and not a theological deconstruction of Harrison's Anglican god, or an apology for Tenskatawa's great spirit.
The first half of the book started out seemingly fair minded, although the author never gets around to addressing the central point of the first half: How did Tenskatawa know that an eclipse would take place?
By constantly attacking Harrison as a dimwitted, social climbing, hypocrite, the author dispenses of any theory that might give credence to any of Harrison's arguments, namely, that the British did seek to interfere in relations with the United States and the Indian populations of the area. This may have included, in my opinion, knowledge that the British had one the most scientifically advanced astronomical observatories in the known world. Navigators used that information. Just thinking out loud here...
The tone of the book becomes more critical towards the U.S. by comparing land deals to the housing bubble of 2008, and the Indian wars to Vietnam. Jefferson becomes a 'college educated, violin playing, slave owner'. Really?
The last two chapters are where all objectivity runs away as speculation over what-if turns into more political commentary.
I don't mind being treated to a critical view, but as Harrison, Jefferson, Monroe and the U.S. generally get hammered by mostly deserved negative appraisals, it seems that the author was reluctant to be as critical with the dozens of tribes who were never able to get along long enough to form a united front.
Don't get me wrong, the two stars were for historical insight. The history gets bogged down in religious guess-timating. I generally don't agree with a secularist religious view, if that's what you'd call it, but he did get his shots in.
9 of 12 people found the following review helpful.
Interesting subject but this is for academics
By Dan Graves
This is a very academic book--not for the general public history enthusiasts. Sometimes I wonder how an entire book can be written about such a short subject. For academics I am sure it is useful, but there are better general histories of U.S.-Native American relations during this period for everyone else.
There is also a lot of bias here--American Indians are noble and good, Harrison and company are either malicious or idiots. While Tecumseh is agreed by almost all to have been quite an impressive figure, my guess is that contemporaries had a rather mixed view of his brother.
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